Everyone should write.
Not to become a great writer, necessarily, but to sharpen your thoughts. Writing is the single most crucial superpower you can give yourself, especially in a world dominated by online interactions. I didn’t learn to write prose until later in life. As my understanding of the sentence deepened, so did my use of the em dash.
The problem is: AI loves em dashes. And italics for emphasis. And lists of three. And repeating its thesis. And shaping paragraphs into eerily similar lengths. It knows how to write well, which raises the question: Why am I still spending so much time learning how to write?
Because I want to learn what I think.
In an era where AI-generated language will eventually saturate nearly every corner of communication, knowing that a piece of writing came from a single human mind, unassisted, will become increasingly rare and valuable.
We all have a friend who was never particularly articulate. Yet over the past few years, their social media posts and emails sound increasingly polished—lots of em dashes, bulleted lists, and italics to suggest voice. Surprise! They’ve probably learned how to use ChatGPT, Claude, or Grok.
I do not believe we should fear AI or criticize those who lean on it as an editorial tool, but I draw the line at using it to generate your writing. If even one sentence is not your original thought, you are robbing yourself and your audience of what you genuinely think. For your corporate job, perhaps. But not if you are making art.
May we shake hands with ourselves and travel not just outward, but inward. As Thoreau wrote: “It is not worth the while to go round the world to count the cats in Zanzibar. You can learn more about yourself by going down the river of your own mind.”
We all worry about how technology is shaping us. I recently watched my one-year-old niece scream for my phone with a desperation that felt chemical, a kind of pre-verbal, cocaine-level hysteria. It was scary to see her forming mind pulled by something she could not possibly understand.
The chess community also once feared the impact of computers. Today, players are better than ever. Chess engines dominate training, but the game remains more popular than ever because we still find human-versus-human competition compelling.
I actually agree with AI that em dashes are often more elegant than commas because they help maintain flow. And I can certainly see the appeal of finishing a writing project faster by asking an LLM to type it out for me. But please, please give yourself the time to discover what you honestly think.
Eventually, and perhaps soon, this article will seem archaic because even free AI systems will be able to mimic any writing style with perfection. But what I am advocating for is not a policy. It’s a feeling.
The feeling of reaching further than your grasp.
The feeling of making something real.
The feeling of knowing this came from me.
And if you think you are immune, think again. Even your spell checker is using A eye.
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How would you feel if you discovered that ChatGPT had written this entire article?
Well written-my Son! 😍
My father stopped mid-sentence – I thought it was a stroke but it turned out just to be an em-dash.